The Sympa Community is proud to release the second beta of the next version of
sympa. Please install it to test and report bugs, translate user interface to
your language, or enhance documentation on Sympa, if you want to help the sympa
community to deliver a more reliable version of Sympa.

The Sympa Community is proud to release the second beta of the next version of sympa. Please install it to test and report bugs, translate user interface to your language, or enhance documentation on Sympa, if you want to help the sympa community to deliver a more reliable version of Sympa.

On Friday, 17th November 2017, the Sympa project was awarded the “JRES program committee special mention”.

The JRES is the biennial conference held for the French Education and Research information technology community. 1,800 people attended the 2017 edition.

During this conference, Marc chantreux and David Verdin, from RENATER, made a presentation about the 20 years history of the Sympa project (French only), trying to capture perls of wisdom in this history, in order to help the project to keep on growing and serving its community. The good reception of the talk was an indicator of the Sympa's current popularity in the Higher education and Research community. It was, however, only a warming up for the speakers, who remained almost speechless when the were given the award.

This award aims at shedding light on a project carrying special interest for this community. It is the first time ever that such an award was given during this conference, which has been held since 1995. Our pride for the award is therefore doubled.

Beyond the emotion of the moment, this award is a recognition of the continuous efforts of the thousands of contributors to the Sympa projects since its inception 20 years ago.

This success was made possible because Sympa evolved to keep on addressing the daily needs during this period when the network usage drastically changed. Sympa bears both its legacy and its modernity. Now that the Internet goes back towards distribution, Sympa is strong thanks to its experience in this area, thanks to its new governance model, its 35 millions users and its contributors all around the world.

After the important changes that occurred during the last year and the involvement of a new generation of young contributors, this award eventually crowns a community that never failed and emphasizes the hope that more and more people are given by free software.

Even on late versions, several big changes on templates have been made. Some of them broke backward compatibility in exchange for bug fixes.
If you have customized templates with earlier version of Sympa, you should check if web interface will work correctly and if system messages are sent correctly after upgrading, and reapply customization to new templates as necessity.

The Sympa Community is proud to release the first beta of the next version of sympa. Please install it to test and report bugs, or translate user interface to your language, if you want to help the sympa community to deliver a more reliable version of Sympa.

Sympa version 0.0.1 was released on the 1st of April 1997. Originally conceived as a mailing list server, it evolved along its 20 years of history to a minimalist groupware server, with strong features for delegation, industrialization and customization. It includes many options for working groups creation and customization, shared documents, web archives, original authorization mechanisms and “many more”, as David Verdin, the former lead developer, stated in his 2014 YAPC::EU presentation of Sympa.

To celebrate Sympa's 20th birthday, the community organizes a hackathon hosted by the Strasbourg university. The aim of the hackathon is to work on a new and modern interface, but you can consider it as the first step towards a Sympa rebirth, from its code internals to the developers community.